Marte Röling - Dreamwork

In 2010, Marte Röling (1939) exhibited 55 portraits by Henk Jurriaans in Museum de Fundatie. Jurriaans was her great love who had died five years previously. Now Röling is back in De Fundatie, not Zwolle this time, but at Kasteel het Nijenhuis in Heino/Wijhe. Röling will show recent pieces in the garden gallery by the castle, most of which have been made especially for the exhibition. Objects and manipulated photographs showing often impossible fantasy sculptures located all over the world. The castle is till 22 January the venue for the colourful landscapes with figures by Röling's mother, the painter Martine Antonie (1909-2006). With her expressive paintings, Antonie demonstrated her passion for nature and the intangible and indescribable life force that as a curious traveller she experienced on her worldwide travels.

Martine Antonie (pseudonym of Tonny Röling-Grolle) made her debut in 1961 at the age of 52 in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She had exhibitions in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1964 and in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in 1966. After this remarkable kick-start, she once again retreated into the anonymity of her own painting studio. Being well known felt restrictive; recognition was not for her. It was the nineteen eighties before the public was once more treated to Antonie's work. The paintings almost all depict landscapes with figures, they are timeless and harmonious. The concise realism she was taught at the 'Rijksakademie' (the academy of fine arts in Amsterdam), which can be detected in a few very skilled early portraits, is nowhere to be found in this later work. Colour and movement are key and, in a sense, separate from the image. While the imagery is modest and unchanging, the colours are pronounced and the expressiveness with which Antonie moves her brush over the canvas can still be felt. The warm colours and decorative division of the planes are reminiscent of mediaeval frescos and mosaics or oriental rugs. There is also a connection with the colourist Intimism of the French painter Pierre Bonnard and the symbolist visions of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Many of the canvases reference trips through Europe, Asia and Africa. Martine Antonie does not depict the landscapes as they appeared to her eyes, but rather she creates on the canvas a feeling of deep connection with the material and spiritual world around her. In other words, she never tried to capture the fleeting and the specific, but painted the permanent and general in the landscape. These are 'dream paintings’, which depict an ideal reality as a sort of earthly paradise.

Martine Antonie, Promontory, 1964, oil on canvas, 65.5 x 90 cm

Marte Röling learned to draw the visible world from her father Gé Röling, who was also her teacher at the Rijksakademie. From her mother, the painter Martine Antonie, she learned in essence to look through things to the very core of the visible world. For Röling, who experienced success from a very young age, both parents were crucial to her artistic development. Röling participated in dozens of exhibitions, both in the Netherlands and abroad, from the end of the nineteen fifties onwards. She was renowned for her fashion drawings for newspaper Het Parool in the nineteen sixties, as well as her portraits of, among others, Queen Beatrix and Prince Claus dating from the nineteen eighties. In addition to her autonomous paintings and sculptures, assignments included artwork for public spaces. Examples include the Flag Monument at the AMC in Amsterdam (1983), a sculpture entitled Non scholae, sed vitae for Groningen University (1999) and the Hanseatic Beacon at the Strandeiland in Harderwijk (2013). Marte Röling created new work for this exhibition by invitation of the Museum de Fundatie.

Röling created a series of 'dream images'. These are images she would love to create but which for various reasons will never be realised.

Some would simply become too enormous, others are technically unfeasible and others will remain dreams due to the extraordinary location the artist chose. By painting and drawing the designs onto photographs, most of which she took herself, the images have become, in a literal sense, imaginable. Realised, and on show in the castle, are Röling's recent ‘spike sculptures’, playful sculptures full of colour and movement, which are presented on very high rods, or spikes.

Although dreams are a condition for making art, discipline is even more critical according to both Martine Antonie and Marte Röling. Creating art is mainly very hard work. You can’t force it, it’s a need; a desire. A loved pursuit. The title of the double exhibition in Museum de Fundatie not only refers to the 'dream paintings' and the 'dream images' of mother and daughter, but also to the profession and pursuit of the artist in general. Just like Antonie, Röling sees her work as 'dream work’; the best profession in the world. Röling is succinct with conviction about the development and creation of her latest work: "I simply had a great time."

Museum de Fundatie manages a substantial collection of visual arts, which has its origins in the collection of Dirk Hannema, former director of Museum Boymans in Rotterdam, and has been completed with important pieces from the art collection of Overijssel Province, among others. Museum de Fundatie has two beautiful sites: Kasteel het Nijenhuis in Heino and the Paleis aan de Blijmarkt in Zwolle, which was expanded in a spectacular way in 2013.